Ukraine (UK Relations with Russia)

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Whittingdale]

These are discussions that will no doubt take place in the Council of Europe. There is not a complete contradiction between the views of my hon. Friends the Members for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and for North Thanet. The issue of voting rights is currently on the table.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

On my hon. Friend’s previous point about sanctions, there is no doubt that if the Russians were to take further military action on any scale in Ukraine we should increase the sanctions regime. There are two areas on which we would need to increase sanctions: anything that could be regarded as military supplies, including French warships; and oil and energy, which would mean that our German friends would suffer considerably as the largest importers of Ukrainian oil and, in particular, gas. Do we not need to try to get all our European allies on board to make the sanctions regime work?

[Mr Whittingdale]

Clearly we do. I am sure the Minister will respond to that point, but my understanding is that we have been very active in pressing the case and I hope we will continue to do so. My hon. Friend refers to the possibility of having to strengthen sanctions in the future. My one concern—I hope it is misplaced, but I fear there is a reason for it to be taken seriously—is whether Russia might seek to move beyond eastern Ukraine and establish the land link between eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and at the same time acquire a seaport at Mariupol. There have been suggestions that that is in the Russian mind, and there is heavy troop build-up that might support the idea, but whether it happens we must wait to see. We must make it clear, however, that were it to take place, there would be severe consequences.

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[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am delighted to have been able to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) for securing the debate. He and I went to Ukraine about a month ago and visited the Prime Minister, Mr Yatsenyuk. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway) when he says that the situation in Ukraine is extremely serious. I have used parallels before, and there are parallels with the German annexation of the Sudetenland. First, they caused trouble with their own German speakers, then they used that as a pretext to go in with military force. That is exactly what has happened with Ukraine. Let us see where this might go.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I must intervene. It is a grotesque insult to Russia, which suffered appallingly at the hands of the Nazis, to equate in any way the Russian Government, for all their faults, with the Nazis. That is just the sort of remark that fills the Russian people with absolute despair. They were raped and pillaged and there were 50 million dead. I hope that my hon. Friend is not making any kind of equation.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Well, I’m afraid I am. Actually, if we look at what happened to the Russian people after the war, we see that they experienced significant suffering, just as some of the German people did during the war. I am just pointing out that what the Russians have done in Ukraine is just as unacceptable as what the German Nazis did during the war. As long as we understand that, we will all appreciate which way we should go forward.

Relations between Ukraine and Russia obviously remain tense, and that is a concern for the UK and the wider world. It is encouraging that the situation seems to have improved in the past few days, but there are still reasons to be extremely worried about the stability of the region and the impact that the situation could have on the United Kingdom.

As I said, I recently visited Ukraine with my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and we met the Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. We met the head of defence and the American and British Ambassadors to Ukraine. We also met the leaders of four political parties. My visit to Ukraine, which took place during the summer, showed me in demonstrable form the dire situation that Ukraine has found itself in since the current round of tensions with Russia began. The former President Victor Yanukovych sent his commissars around businesses and absconded with several billion pounds when he fled to Russia. That added to Ukraine’s already parlous financial situation, leading to the devaluation of the hryvnia against the dollar, with the currency hitting a 10-year low. Naturally, that has made it more difficult for Ukraine to buy much-needed foreign goods.

It seems that the situation in the region might have improved over the past few days, with the news that a ceasefire in the east of the country between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels seems to be holding, and with hopes of further talks in Belarus tomorrow. Let us hope that the day of silence called by President Poroshenko will hold, and offer real hope of a lasting truce, rather than simply being a lull before a new round of military action.

It is welcome that Russia has resumed gas supplies to Ukraine after months of difficult talks. This will be a substantial help to Ukraine during the winter. The annexe to the House of Commons Library briefing shows just how important this is to Ukraine, as it imports 25.1 billion cubic metres of Russian gas. I know that the Ukrainian Prime Minister will welcome this development, as getting through the winter was precisely what he was concerned about when we spoke during my visit. When I asked him what would be the most appropriate assistance for the west to give, he shrugged his shoulders and suggested everything from military uniforms through to the most sophisticated weaponry to combat the supplies being provided to the rebels by Russia. We know that the west is not going to supply any such sophisticated weaponry. As if to emphasise his point, he said:

“We have a very difficult winter to get through”.

Additionally, we have seen reports that TB, hepatitis, HIV and AIDS are spreading largely unchecked as a result of fighting in eastern Ukraine, caused by a lack of medical supplies. Luhansk and Donetsk saw the most deaths from TB in Ukraine last year and the highest co-infection rates of HIV and TB. This is yet another reason why it is in Ukraine’s interest to normalise the situation, so that the people are not condemned to suffer from those illnesses.

As I have said, the situation seems to have stabilised slightly. Reports of the ceasefire holding are much more encouraging than the reports we were receiving until recently which told of daily violations of the ceasefire. However, we must be open to the fact that relations between Russia and Ukraine remain tense. Ukraine is resolute against more land grabs by Russia. The Ukrainian Government are maintaining solidarity, as we heard, with their citizens in Crimea by continuing to supply them with food and water. The Prime Minister was most resolute that most Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine did not want to secede from Ukraine and be reunited with Russia, and that in the west of Ukraine there was almost 100% support for closer relations with Europe. Given that support for a united Ukraine, the Government are and should be committed to maintaining their territorial integrity, and we should support them in any way we can in that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon has mentioned, those statements from the Ukrainian Prime Minister were exemplified by the recent elections in Ukraine in October, when the old Party of Regions did not even feature on the ballot paper, while the President’s, Prime Minister’s and the Mayor of Lviv’s parties received a combined 54.93% share of the votes cast. That was a vote in favour of a pro-European direction, and it shows a clear intention of the people of Ukraine that they favour closer links with Europe.

However, Russia, has until now not been listening to the democratic results in Ukraine. The universal view we found in Ukraine was that Putin is not finished yet. So what is likely to happen? A minority thought he would carry out a big military offensive, including establishing a Mariupol corridor to supply Crimea. That is difficult in the winter because the barges cannot go across the Black sea. We were told that in such circumstances Ukrainians would defend themselves with whatever they had. However, as my hon. Friend said, we were also told that 70% of their tanks had already been taken out by the Russians. The majority view, and possibly the one to which I would subscribe, is that Putin will keep causing relatively minor trouble wherever he can in order to destabilise the whole country, with the aim of bringing about a failed state. At this point, the Americans and the EU would have to decide whether they wanted to bail Ukraine out. Many people think that Putin’s aim is to gain control of the whole of the north coast of the Black sea, including Odessa, and eventually, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) said, move along to Transnistria in Moldova. Certainly, the Romanians and the Poles, in neighbouring states, are very alarmed by that prospect.

The future of our bilateral relations depends on Putin’s strategy. Clearly, the illegal seizure of Crimea is sufficient rationale for Britain to lead Europe, along with the USA, in the implementation of strong sanctions. In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, I alluded to the fact that if there were to be further military action along the lines I have indicated, for example, taking a Mariupol corridor, we would have to consider ratcheting up the sanctions regime further. As others have said in this debate, the sanctions have already worked, with a 40% devaluation of the rouble against the dollar, a plummeting stock exchange and the drying up of foreign investment, all of which is compounded by a falling oil price—it was below $64 a barrel yesterday. This has all pushed up the cost of Russian borrowing from just under 8% in December 2013 to 12% today, and has led to President Putin saying in his annual state of the nation address that Russia would go into recession in 2015, with the economy ministry predicting a contraction of 0.8% instead of the previous prediction of an increase in GDP of 1.2%.

If tensions between Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the rest of the EU are to be reduced, we must develop a more intelligent relationship between all these players. We must recognise that deep within the Russian psyche is the perception that their hegemony is being encroached on by the west; the Russians’ fear is that if Ukraine integrates further with the EU, their geopolitical sphere of influence will diminish. Geopolitics is incredibly important to Russia, perhaps more important than economic success. That could be why, despite the deteriorating economy, Putin’s personal approval ratings are currently running at 80%.

There are many areas where we could be co-operating with the Russians which we have simply had to close off. For example, we could co-operate in relation to the Islamic threat, as Russia faces a huge Islamic threat on its southern flank. There are many other areas on which we could be co-operating but are not able to do so at the moment.

If it is in Russia’s interest to have economically stable countries on its border, we must continue to emphasise the benefits of that. For example, it would be able to form strong bilateral trade agreements to its mutual advantage. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South has said, the alternative is for Europe to diversify its oil and gas supplies away from Russia, which would hit it badly, especially with the low oil price at the moment. Russia may have started looking east towards China to sell its oil and gas, but it will always need the European markets, technology and expertise.

Closer economic co-operation between Russia and the EU was beginning to happen under Gorbachev, but it has since fallen off the cliff edge. We must try to reinstate that again. Improving economic relations and trying to convince the Russians that mutual economic success is more important than geopolitics will lead to better political and diplomatic relations between the UK, EU, Ukraine and Russia. After all, we are all Europeans at heart.

Although things may be improving slightly between Ukraine and Russia, relations remain incredibly poor. There is concern that this improvement in the past week or so is simply a lull to allow both sides to regroup. It is in everyone’s interest to improve these relations and to achieve stability.

To improve relations between Ukraine, the UK and Russia, we must remind the Russians that we are all Europeans and that, instead of suffering from sanctions, we could all enjoy much greater economic success by putting geopolitics to one side and co-operating. Allowing Ukraine to flourish, as Poland did, could be a huge benefit to Russia. We should be encouraging closer economic co-operation, which will in turn develop into closer political relations.

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[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is 33 years since I first met my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), and it is a real pleasure to sit beside him in the Chamber today and listen to his very sensible remarks about a situation that might see him classified as a bit of a peacenik. [Interruption.] He snorts at the suggestion. However, the circumstances in which we met all those years ago were the depths of the cold war. We co-operated with our colleague Tony Kerpel and others sadly no longer alive, such as George Miller, to do everything we could to counter communist-inspired campaigns to undermine the defences of western Europe in general and NATO in particular. Therefore, I do not think that either of us has a track record of being soft on the Russians. Why is it, then, that without having compared notes, we both find ourselves today urging caution in this scenario?

My hon. Friend concentrated on his historical analysis. I will concentrate on a rather simpler analytical approach. It boils down to one clear proposition: do not make military threats that cannot be or are not intended to be fulfilled. If military threats are made under those circumstances and they are not then fulfilled, there is a danger that your credibility is undermined for a time later, when you might have to issue a threat of retaliation that you intend to fulfil, and your adversary will not believe you mean it. That is how wars can start by mistake; because people do not take each other’s statements of position seriously.

Why does that relate specifically to Ukraine? It relates to Ukraine because the danger of the approach we are taking toward Ukraine in our rhetoric is to lump that non-NATO country together with other countries that are members of NATO. I must say to my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I congratulate on securing the debate and on the way in which he presented his case, that I agree entirely with his view of the condemnation-worthy activities that Russia is carrying out. However, I do not agree with saying that if Russia gets its way in Ukraine and in places such as Moldova and Georgia, then its next step will be to threaten the Baltic states, because we must not lump these things together.

NATO membership must never be offered glibly, lightly, or without thought of the consequences. [Interruption.] I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) agrees. We must consider the consequences of offering NATO membership without a serious intent to apply article 5 in circumstances of potential war. We all know what article 5 means: if any NATO country is attacked, the attacker is automatically at war with all the other members of NATO.

I never tire of making the point I am about to make. I have made it many times before and I am not going to be deterred from making it again; it is, indeed, a point about deterrence. In order for deterrence to work, it is not only necessary to show that if someone is attacked, the consequences—the retaliation—will be unacceptable; one must also show that it will be unavoidable. One must not give the potential aggressor any reason to gamble that he might be able to commit an act of aggression without facing the consequences.

When countries came together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the intention was precisely to remove that uncertainty, which had existed in the 1930s. Then Hitler was able to gamble, while picking off one country after another, that the western democracies would do nothing. In fact, he got away with it in several countries, in a succession of aggressive manoeuvres, but then picked on one country too many and ended up involved in a war with the United Kingdom—or the British empire, as it still was at the time—on which he did not originally wish to embark.

By talking tough in military terms on the question of Ukraine, we are, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough suggested, in danger of avoiding the realities on the ground. As I have pointed out before, when Russia stood in control of the whole of central and eastern Europe, there were periods when one country after another tried to shake off the communist yoke. We saw it in East Germany in 1953; we saw it in Hungary in 1956; and I personally remember seeing it in Czechoslovakia when I was 16 years old in 1968. At that time, when Czechoslovakia seemed to have got out from under totalitarian control, I argued very strongly that we should offer it NATO membership in order to try to protect it. I realise now, because I am rather more experienced in the ways of the world, that that would have been a counsel of madness, because given our ability to protect the country that we would be promising to protect, the promise would have been totally lacking in credibility.

It totally lacks credibility to suggest that countries such as Georgia and Ukraine should be offered NATO membership. Not many people are present in the Chamber today, but I predict—I hope I never have occasion to see this prediction come true—that if the country about which we were concerned were a NATO member, the Chamber would be packed, and that is because we would effectively be debating whether we were prepared to start world war three on behalf of that country, whichever NATO member it happened to be.

I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that the Baltics must be our red line. I was very interested to hear my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham mention in an earlier intervention how, during his time in NATO, he had expressed concern about the extension of the NATO guarantee to so many countries from central and eastern Europe. I must say that I felt we were stretching the elastic to its limit when we extended that guarantee to the Baltic states, but I accept that we have a long history of trying to secure the independence of those states, stretching right back to the days of the Russian revolution itself. Therefore, there is a significant degree of credibility that we would be willing to resist militarily an invasion of the Baltic states, but that is not true in the case of Ukraine.

I can imagine four principal scenarios in Ukraine. The first is that, in an ideal world, Russia will have a change of heart, or sanctions will work and she will withdraw and restore the pro-Russian areas of Ukraine to Kiev’s control. I think that a fairly unlikely outcome. The second scenario, which in my opinion would be the best, would be an agreed decision to create an autonomous area within Ukraine, comprising the pro-Russian elements and territories. The country could therefore continue as a political entity, but with a loose federal structure.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend is talking about dividing up a sovereign nation. Surely it is a question of self-determination and up to the people of Ukraine to decide that.

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, in an ideal world it would be, but there is a slight problem with that scenario, namely that the Russians have the power to impose a solution and nobody else is willing to fight them to prevent them from doing so. That is the hard reality. We may not like the situation any more than we liked that in 1968 when Russia imposed its will with the crushing of the Prague spring; but I do not think anybody would suggest even now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it would have been right to provoke world war three at that time. In situations where we are up against people with a lot of power, we have to contain them until political affairs evolve gradually in the direction we want them to go.